Festival Ready: with Matt Ready - DRINKS! Edition

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Booster Juice

Man, it’s a hot one, like seven inches from the mid-day sun. Well, you hear the whisper and the words melt everyone, how do you stay so cool? Not since the summer of ’99 when Santana teamed up with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas has there been a mixture so smooth as the Smoothies from Booster Juice. You won’t have to give the world to lift one up though, just a few bucks will do. They are sooooo smooth. With so many flavours to choose from it’s hard to pick one but if I might make a suggestion; Pomegranate Punch is what you’ll see me drinking because it’s the perfect blend of tart and sweet. Also because they are so smooth you’ll be asking Annie if she’s ok cause this smoothie is so smooth it’s criminal. Just don’t get any stains on the carpet.

Lemon Heaven Lemonade

Granted I am a little late getting around to Lemonade but after listening to it I definitely agree that the Queen Bee was most certainly making her hubbie live the Hard Knock Life for at least however long it took her to record what could ultimately end up as her opus. Their is is just no way, as talented as Beyonce is, that she could infuse such a cocktail of emotion into every line. You can hear her pain, her anger, her sadness, her questioning with every single note she emits. You almost have to take a break from the world after listening to it because she just seems to be wrangling demons and processing them through her vocal chords, and it takes the listener on an exhausting sonic journey. A masterpiece from track 1 to… What? This isn’t supposed to be a review of Beyonce’s 2016 surprise album, Lemonade? Full disclosure…I did think it was weird that Tony wanted me to write about an album that wasn’t put out by any of the bands performing at the Festival this year, not to mention one that came out last year. So I’m supposed to be talking about the Lemonade made by Lemon Heaven? Honestly I thought Beyonce had just changed her name to Lemon Heaven, yeah like how Snoop Dogg used to be Snoop Doggie Dogg and was shortly also Snoop Lion after that one time he went to Jamaica. And if that was the case I wasn;t going to question it for fear of upsetting the B Hive, they scare me! Anyway Lemon Heaven, they do Lemonade right. Made right in front of you from start to finish. From squeezing the lemons to mixing it all up, which is done the Bond way by the way, “Shaken not stirred”. The whole thing gives you a bit of a beverage show before you get to escape from the scorching heat in your own little Lemon flavoured…Heaven! See what I did there, yeah I’m good!

Land Shark

I first discovered Land Shark during a US road trip that took us through South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach. We had stopped at Jimmy Buffet’s Land Shark restaurant because one of my fellow road trippers was obsessed with Sharknado and after 16 hours on the road I was starting to get hAngry so I acquiesced. That pit stop put a once and for all end to my search for a consistent beer to drink in America. Prior to that I was forced to either drink which ever watered down swill was on tap OR cough up the price of an import to drink something I could get for half the price back home. That was 5 years ago, so imagine my pleasant surprise when last summer I stepped into my local LCBO to find that familiar fin stalking me from beneath the waves of lesser beers. I swear John Williams was there conducting his orchestra, duunnn dunnn... duuuunnnn duun... duuunnnnnnnn dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn dunnnn. The Shark that had quenched my thirst on so many end of summer road trips down south had finally followed me home, I felt like Michael Caine, except in a good way and with better dialogue and less franchise ruining (google it).

Waterloo Dark

I’m just going to be Frank, [Neil, can you insert a cleaver set of Sinatra lyrics that don’t make the Frank-Frank pun seem lame. Thanks.]

I know I’m hilarious, seriously though … [You’re probably not going to add the lyrics are you? You’re going to ignore it and just leave my note here to make me look stupid aren’t you? NEIL!!!]

complete disclosure, I am not a fan of Dark Beers. There I said it I know that I have just left many readers upset and dismayed (which both mean the same thing so way to be dramatically redundant dark beer drinkers.) I can’t help it I just don’t like the coffee taste that so many of them seem to have, aaaaaaaand there goes more readers. Not everybody has to like coffee you know, it’s called a coffee cup not a coffee cult! Jerks! Will everybody just let me say my piece about Waterloo Dark!? I am not a fan of Dark ... I’ll wait. Thank you. Of Dark Beer. That being said Waterloo Dark doesn’t have that heavy, I just ate a meal feeling and although I may not end up drinking it all night I would be up for alternating between it and say I don’t know…Flowers! Plummer! Candy Gram! I’m just a dolphin…Oh no it’s Land Shark!

Margaritaville Classic Margarita

Not going to lie I haven’t actually tried this one yet but I wanted to include it for two reasons; so I could say, “What would Jimmy Buffet Do?” and also so I could post this GIF as a response to, “What would Jimmy Buffet Do?”